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HONG KONG—Confronted with a rising tide of bans and boycotts, the outfits that sell shark fin are fighting back – just this week, with a high-profile onslaught of ads in the industry's epicenter that says sharks aren’t endangered, and charges that Western cultural supremacy lies behind the global campaign to shun this unlikely delicacy.

The protests, according to the leading trade group for shark products, are intended “to incite the public to discriminate against our own eating culture.” It claims Western conservation groups “use the shark issue as a fund-raising gimmick. We now make a vow to voice out and unveil those lies.”

But shark-finning interests fight this battle mainly behind closed doors. They pack the UN-endorsed group that’s supposed to protect sharks with friends – consultants who work for them, government officials who are supposed to promote their home industries, lobbyists who front shady educational groups, and even outright employees.

Just can't wait to get over the wedding part, so we can finally deplete the oceans' biodiversity.

The result: feeble, dilatory, and otherwise ineffective oversight of a business that according to research oceanologists takes as many as 73 million sharks a year, and damages ecosystems that support fisheries feeding hundreds of millions. According to the Pew Environment Group, shark populations have declined from 70 to 80 percent over the last 50 years, and 30 percent of species are now endangered including the hammerhead, whose fin is especially prized for soup.

Blame prosperity. Many of the world’s Chinese crave the social status they get for offering shark fin soup at banquets and weddings. Now more and more of them can afford it, even at prices exceeding $100 per bowl, and consumption has gone up dramatically over the last two decades,

But overfishing can have devastating consequences for ocean life. And shark-finning itself – often slicing the fin from a still-living shark and tossing it back into the ocean to drown, making room for more of the highly-profitable fins—arouses widespread revulsion. A number of cities and states in North America have passed laws against serving shark fin, and a number of top Hong Kong restaurants and hotels have followed suit.

"The UN treaty is supposed to protect animals from becoming threatened by international trade, but pro-trade lobbyists have managed to rally the one-third of the vote needed to veto any proposal," according to Peter Knights, executive director of the global anti-smuggling NGO, WildAid, referring to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. Such vetoes cast in secret balloting kept the hammerhead off the list at a CITES meeting in Doha, Qatar in 2010.

In a more recent example, an event in Singapore, an influential member of the CITES shark group described the campaign against shark finning as a Western “attack on Chinese culture.” Dr. Giam Choo-Hoo claimed most sharks are caught by small-scale subsistence fishermen, most shark fin is a product of accidental catches, and sharks don’t need protection anyway. Everything he said in this forum flies in the face of a vast consensus of scientific data, and is extensively disproven by dozens of research organizations and academic institutions.

But Dr. Giam’s impartiality is in question. According to the Washington Post, he introduces himself as a representative of the shark fin industry. He advises leaders of the trade group, the Marine Products Association (which just recently took the words ‘Shark Fin' off its name), and he vigorously slaps down measures to protect sharks at CITES meetings around the world, as described in a police investigator's report endorsed by Sea Shepherd, the Seattle-based conservation group.

He’s not even a shark expert – his specialty is crocodiles, and he works for companies that make them into luxury handbags. But he does take the shark fin issue seriously. He explains that because shark fin soup is the “number one most prestigious thing to serve at a big event in China,” Chinese people do not want it banned, and he campaigns avidly for that result.

Others wonder why the 78-year-old veterinarian has a public forum in the first place. “Only here where the industry is strong and the press is weak can you characterize such a biased charade as an impartial debate,” Knights said.